The colorful and stirring scenes presented by these great race-meetings need not be left to the imagination, for they are illustrated with a wealth of detail in the mosaics which have been brought together in the Musée Alaoui at the Palace of the Bardo, and are described at great length by the writers of the period. How thoroughly human, how like a similar event to-day, is the description given us by Ovid, who relates how he took a girl to the races, how he shielded her face from the sun with his race-card, how he admired the shapeliness of her leg, and how he wished that he might see more. The racing world was divided into four great parties or factions: the Reds, the Whites, the Greens, and the Blues. The members of each party regarded those of the others with deep-seated animosity and suspicion, and, when they eventually developed into political factions, their rivalries shook the Roman world. Four chariots, each of one color and each drawn by four horses, raced in a heat. The “racing silks” of the charioteers consisted of round vizorless caps with floating ribbons and cloth jerkins in the colors of the faction for which they drove. Round their bodies were tied the ends of the reins, an arrangement which added greatly to the excitement of the races by insuring the death of any one who was thrown, for no Roman holiday was considered complete without its quota of fatal accidents. Down the middle of the elliptical course ran the _spina_, a marble barrier 330 yards in length, adorned with statues, carvings, and columns. At either end of the _spina_ stood the _metæ_, the turning-points for the chariots; on these were placed marble dolphins and eggs, seven of each, corresponding in number with the laps of the race, one being removed by the attendants as each circuit was completed, very much as signals are hoisted for the information of the spectators at the conclusion of each lap of an automobile race. Judging by this, and by the length of the _spina_, each heat must have been close to three miles in length. The charioteers received from their enthusiastic adherents the admiration and adulation which is to-day accorded to a famous baseball player, a champion prize-fighter, or, in Spain, to a successful matador. Though they did not earn as much, perhaps, as a Babe Ruth, a Jack Dempsey, a Red Grange, or even a Tod Sloan, they were lavishly rewarded according to the standards of the time; for it is recorded that in ten years an African driver named Crescens won prizes totaling upward of a million and a half sesterces, or about seventy-one thousand dollars in our money. And one of the handsomest residences unearthed at Carthage is that of Scorpianus, one of the most famous charioteers of his time. [Illustration: HOMES OF THE TROGLODYTES The dwellings of the Matmata mole-men at Bled-Kebira consist of vaulted rooms hewn from the living rock, even the bed being one with the floor